Borden wins Pinnell award

Professor Victor Borden

Victor Borden, Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, has won the 2020 W. George Pinnell Award from Indiana University.

The award is given annually to a faculty member who is considered to be a shining example of dedication and excellence in service to others. 

While Borden says it was nice to win, the biggest pleasure of the process for him was reading the nomination and support letters from the dozen colleagues who wrote them, replete with appreciative comments of his contributions to IU and efforts to improve higher education at the national and international levels.

“I hope I have contributed to the ‘culture of evidence’ at IU for determining in what ways our programs and processes serve IU students, and how we can improve those processes to promote more equitable educational outcomes for diverse learners,” he said. “In the process, I hope I have helped to train and ignite the passion for this work among young institutional research and assessment practitioners, who I teach and mentor through IU’s higher education doctorate programs as well as the graduate certificate in institutional research.”

His research continues despite the pandemic: this past summer Borden has been developing proposals for the Lilly Endowment Inc. Charting the Future initiative. One of those proposals combines analytics, ethnographic research and IU practitioner and scholar expertise to guide a set of initiatives intended to improve college and career readiness and college success among low-income, first-generation students of color and other under-served populations across the educational pipeline, focusing at first on the period from high school into college and then into the workforce. Guided by what the team learns in Phase 2, Borden said Phase 3 proposes to infuse artificial intelligence (AI) into several instructional systems and support services to reduce the “digital divide” between privileged and underserved student populations.

Borden will be celebrated at an awards event tentatively scheduled for next April.